Man Goes Without Power For Eight Days Because ComEd Won't Believe That His Power Is Out

It’s completely understandable that you might lose power following a massive storm. It’s even understandable that you might be without power for several days while the power company repairs damaged lines. What doesn’t make sense is when you have no electricity because the power company is convinced that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

A 73-year-old Chicago-area man was one of more than 400,000 people who lost power following a particularly horrendous storm in late June. But while other people’s power started coming back on, this chap remained in the dark.

You’ll be shocked to hear that repeated calls from the man, and later his son, to the power company resulted a dead end. The son tells NBC Chicago that he was twice told by reps at Commonwealth Edison that “The power is back on, everything’s okay… Am I sure that there’s a problem?”

It wasn’t until after he threatened to get the local news involved that ComEd actually got workers out to his father’s house and had the power restored.

After ComEd finally got the man’s electricity back up and running, it issued an apology, saying that it was a case of human error; a dispatcher mistakenly marked the problem as “complete” and “service restored,” which is why subsequent ComEd employees didn’t believe that the power was still off.

For a guy that spent over a week living without electricity, the ComEd customer is happy just to have the problem resolved: “”Things happen. It happens tomorrow. It happens next week. People make mistakes.”

Regardless, this is just another sad example of customer service reps discounting a customer complaint because a line of text on their monitor says all is well. They would rather get in trouble for following the rules without question than go through the hassle of actually believing the customer and resolving the issue.